Monday, November 19, 2018

New Delhi: In a first, India may soon rank its airlines based on the quality of services they provide to flyers. The quality could be determined by the ratio of passengers flown by an airline and the number of complaints received against it.

Aviation minister Suresh Prabhu said this on Monday while launching an upgraded version of the ministry’s portal for consumers, “AirSewa 2.0” that promises to make registration of grievances and their redressal faster. “We can look at categorisation of airlines. For this, we can take the help of Quality Council of India to determine the parameters for ranking airlines. Accordingly, customer feedback received on AirSewa can be used to rank airlines,” Prabhu said.

Airlines ranked lower, he said, will work to improve their ranking as passengers will choose carriers that are perceived to be more customer-friendly. And that way, the overall level of service from airlines will improve.
Prabhu, from his earlier stint as railway minister and his deputy in aviation ministry Jayant Sinha, has been proactive on social media to solve consumer grievances.
“Individually, I have been trying to do that as much as possible like Prabhu from his days in railway and Sushma Swaraj in external affairs. My social media inbox is flooded with issues faced by flyers. Given the volume of complaints, we needed a systematic thing for registering grievances and redressing them for which AirSewa was launched and has now been upgraded,” Sinha said.
19/11/18 Saurabh Sinha/Times of India